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TED2014: Boston bombing victim trips the light fantastic with new leg

Christian Lightner and Adrianne Haslet-Davis at TED2014 in Vancouver. Dance instructor Haslet-Davis lost her leg in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, but is dancing again thank to a new high-tech prosthetic. Courtesy James Duncan Davidson/TED.

Photograph by: Ryan Lash
, Ryan Lash

VANCOUVER -- Looking as if she was performing as she had as a dance instructor, Adrianne Haslet-Davis stepped on to the main stage at the TED conference Wednesday and elegantly moved across the floor.

Dressed in a glittering white, sequined outfit, she twirled and stepped and swung, as her partner Christian Lightner gently guided her. It might have simply been another entertainment performance at TED, but in this case, it was Haslet-Davis’ first public performance since a bomb blew off her left leg in last year’s Boston Marathon bombing.

Replacing Haslet-Davis’ leg is a new and highly computerized prosthetic developed by another amputee, Hugh Herr, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab.

This was a marriage of high science, raw determination and angry stare-down of the effects terrorists hope they instil when they set off explosives like the one that nearly killed Haslet-Davis.

Only once did Haslet-Davis stumble ever so slightly, and she raised her hand to her mouth in emotion. But to the packed crowd in the TED theatre, it made no difference. They gave her a thunderous standing ovation, and not a few people had tears in their eyes. Former U.S. vice-president Al Gore, a TED attendee, later came over and congratulated her.

Haslet-Davis, 33, has become the newest public symbol of courage in the face of terrorism, enabled by computerized advancements in prosthetic technology Herr developed over the years as a result of his losing his own two legs in a climbing accident in 1982.

Herr gave a talk at TED outlining the newest developments in his work and explained how computer chips and programming now give to amputees devices that are more efficient and progressive than ordinary limbs. Climb a mountain? Sure. He’s done it.

Herr said he was motivated to help Haslet-Davis after he met her during a speech at Boston’s Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital. He’d gone there to talk to families of the bombing victims. After hearing that she was a professional dancer, he felt he could help her.

“In 3.5 seconds, the criminals and cowards took Adrianne off the dance floor. In 200 days we put her back. We will not be intimidated, brought down, diminished, conquered or stopped by acts of violence,” Herr told the TED audience to applause.

“After meeting her and driving home in my car I thought I’m an MIT professor, I have resources, let’s build her a bionic limb to allow her to back to her life of dance,” he said.

But developing a bionic prosthesis to recognize the repetitive motions of walking is one thing. Getting one to recognize non-repetitive movements such as dancing is quite another, he said. Using a team of researchers, he recruited dancers of similar size and electronically mapped their movements. The team then programmed a bionic leg to anticipate those movements.

Haslet-Davis is still emotionally affected by the bombing and found the media attention from her performance draining. She declined most interviews, but did a brief one with CBC Radio, which shared it with other media.

Haslet-Davis didn’t want to talk about the day of the bombing and said she is still working through her emotions. Instead, she relayed how she saw through her own immediate grief to understand Herr’s unbending belief that she would one day dance again.

“I heard him speak and say “I believe in a world where people can take their legs on and off and be looked at with the same acceptance that people have taking on and off glasses or popping in contacts,’” she said.

“I just kept thinking how can he think about prosthetics. My whole life has changed, my world is different, my body is different, so different in fact it felt like I had a hand growing out of my head.

“Him saying that was the first time I felt like he had reached me, someone had reached me, and that just maybe it was OK for me to be an amputee.”

Haslet-Davis has practised with the new limb for four or five months. She was nervous approaching the TED stage, and Herr said a practice run before had not gone well. But this time, it was different.

“And then I got to dance. It was the first time since the Marathon bombing and it was incredible. And I danced and then I cried,” she said. “I was happy to be back, I didn’t think I would be back this soon.”

“(I was) crying for happiness because I could get there, and crying because I saw grown men bawling in the audience and crying because I know I still have a long way to go.”

Herr said prosthetic research has advanced considerably since he lost his legs to frostbite after a climbing accident. Bionic limbs today have sensors that can sense their position, forces and acceleration, Herr said. Haslet-Davis’s dance limb has 12 sensors.

“Dance can present a more formidable technical problem because every step doesn’t look like the previous step. So that was certainly a challenge,” he said.

The limb uses a synthetic motor controlled by microprocessors to move the joint. “We programmed that chip so that the synthetic motor moves the bionic limb that is appropriate for dance.”

Haslet-Davis said she will use the limb for competition dancing but has other limbs for regular motion.

Herr said his lab underwrote the cost of her dance limb but her other legs are paid for through insurance.

“If a technology is truly bionic, in that it repairs a human function, I would argue it is extremely cost-effective. I would argue it reduces health care payout across the patient’s life span,” Herr said.

He said the cost of the limb is the equivalent to a flea on the back of an elephant “The economic elephant are those secondary effects (of surgery, medication and pain). The fly is the cost of the prosthesis. So even if you double or triple the cost of the prosthesis, if it solves those other conditions, it is a massive win.”

Christian Lightner and Adrianne Haslet-Davis at TED2014 in Vancouver. Dance instructor Haslet-Davis lost her leg in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, but is dancing again thank to a new high-tech prosthetic. Courtesy James Duncan Davidson/TED.

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